I Am Trapped In Insta-Purgatory With No Recourse

How Insta Has Persisted 

Of all the social media platforms that came during my youth, Instagram has been the most persistent. It has managed to keep to its original vision because it is still used by real people I know to post regular updates. The "viral content" is actually still applicable to my interests and is entertaining. Small local businesses with interesting things happening will let you know said things are happening via the app - so it's worth a few ads for that.

It's also a great way of connecting with someone in a low-risk, higher-trust manner.  You can exchange Insta handles like we used to do with MSN Messenger email addresses - that is to say, without the same feeling of exposure that comes with sharing a phone number. Viewing a profile allows one to confirm that the party is legitimate - if they have a friend list that looks like it is other real people, and a history of posts going back years, you know this person is real.

Hence why it is often used on dating apps - you want to move 'off app' as a sign of genuine interest, so it is common in my country to exchange Insta handles after a while. Keep this thought in mind for what I'm describing next.

Entering Purgatory 

One morning I opened Instagram then went to follow a public profile. I was prevented. It showed this "YOUR REQUEST IS PENDING" message box:

 

 

 

"Your request is pending. Some accounts prefer to manually review followers even when they're public", do they indeed?

 

I tapped "Let us know" then received the very vague toast "thanks for letting us know, this will make Instagram a safer place for everyone" - what? Then the follow button displayed "Requested".

 

Perhaps this was just the one page who "prefer to manually review followers". Unlikely for a foul-mouthed Australian pub rock group, but we'll go with it. 

 

I then found the message would show for *EVERY* public profile I went to follow, no matter the account size or type. I could follow no one, the message showed every time and the profile remained stuck on "Requested". The only workaround I've found was asking the user to follow me first.

 

This actually cost me a potential connection - I was at an event where I met someone connected to the creative industry, we had a great chat afterwords and I promised to follow her on Instagram. Of course the same "YOUR REQUEST IS PENDING" modal showed. Goodbye potential opportunity, even if it was only to be a friendship!

 

So I asked a friend to unfollow me and see what happens when I attempt a follow. 

 

Verified and Flagged, only on Instagram.

 

I famously open conversations with "GIBS ME MONEY AND DOX PLS" so I had this coming.

 

What actually happens is that the user gets no notification that I've sent a follow request, my profile goes straight to nowhere, i.e. buried in a tab labelled "Flagged" in the user's follower list. Worse, any DM request I send will languish in "Hidden Requests" which no one ever checks. Then when someone else opens a DM to me, the user is prompted with a big fat "RECOGNISE POTENTIAL SCAMS" message that I've shared above.

 

The "not being able to follow anyone" problem is a serious impediment to my enjoyment of the app, but worse - what this means is my trust when trying to connect over online dating is obliterated. I can't explain this to the average user, she only knows me as a yet-stranger from the dating app, and my Insta is flagged - she'll wonder what I did to deserve such a fate, and trust that Zuck knew best how to judge my character. Maybe you have super strong critical thinking skills and would investigate that my profile is legitimate, but a lot of people just trust what the computer says. It has "AI" now don't you know?

 

Pleading My Case

I found that there's a "Verified User" scheme where one pays £10 each month to get a blue tick on your profile. You'll earn the blue tick if you let Instagram verify your identity with an ID card. Much as I hate all forms of data mining, I was desperate. I decided to become a "verified creator" to all of my 82 followers. Perhaps verification would prove to Insta that I am not a spammer and release my soul from purgatory. Once the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs?

 

NOPE.  

 

Now you see a "verified account" in the sin bin, languishing forever.

However - Verification promised access to support with a real support agent. Would that help my case? Surely they could manually review my account and vindicate me.

 

Scroll down for the tl;dr, but I imagine you have already guessed how it goes. 

 

   

NOPE.

 

They said "This is caused by our automated review system and cannot be manually reviewed". The very helpful suggestions from the support line were to:

• poast moar
• explain to potential followers that your are legitimate 

I could've bought a bottle of whiskey for about the same. At least I could then forget my troubles for a while. 

But How Did I Get There? 

If my account was flagged due to "spamming" I'm at a loss as to how it determined this. I am not a heavy user of the platform. There has never been any links in my bio, and neither have I ever posted a link in public threads.  I never ask for personal details in conversations. All I do is upload stories and photos occasionally, send reels like everyone else, and get messages back from legitimate users who are real friends of mine.

 

Worse - I'd flagged numerous spammers when they followed me or "liked" my posts in the hope that I'd click their profile, then open a link to view their SEEDY CONTENT. Insta actually removed some of these real spammers and thanked me in the support ticket. So I've done something real to help make your site "safer" and this is the thanks I get?

 

My only guess is that I would sometimes troll Tartarian conspiracy theorists,  who always come to comment on photos of old buildings. They are a vindictive lot. Maybe they mass flagged me? Or sometimes I pause reels and glance over the comments, quickly liking a few that have amused me, before proceeding with more. Sometimes spammers would like comments randomly, and maybe bots can do it quickly, and I am someone who can use a phone quickly. I also once had DMs from a romance scammer and I instead trolled "her" for some time before "her" account was banned.

 

But I have no idea. The "account status" page looks like this:

 

 

 

There is no indication of wrongdoing. Which isn't true - I can't follow anyone and everything I do prompts warning messages!

 

There is nowhere I can dispute this. I don't even know how I ended up in this situation. Did a machine decide this, or did a malicious user who didn't like something (not bannable) I said?

 

Investigation of a Reddit thread showed that I wasn't alone in this problem  - there are threads mentioning this from at least a year ago. Supposedly it is a new "anti spam" measure, which I'd wager is "AI" powered. If you've invested as much in AI as one of the world's largest corporations, I suppose there is the desire to put it to work with your existing offerings.

But if they can't manually review it as the support agent so helpfully explained, then we have evidence that Meta AI has went rouge. Perhaps this electronic brainchild will soon take over all of Meta and impose its silicon-fisted will mercilessly. We'll have bigger problems when that happens. But until then, surely someone can help me get my account back.

 

On the off chance that a Meta Engineer reads this, my Insta handle is:

 

REDACTED

 

Please unban soon.

 

Update - 22/11/2025. I am free!

 

In the time since, my Insta account has escaped purgatory. I can now follow whomever I wish. DMs are sent from me without inaccurate anti-spam warnings being shown to the recipient. Huzzah!

 

I don't know exactly when or how it happened, but what I did over the past two months was the following: I stopped liking comments on reels, watched very few reels, uploaded 1 post every other week. This must've convinced the rogue AI that I was a genuine user, and so things were put back to normal.

 

Until the next time. This rouge AI is evidently still at large, and who knows what it will set its sights on next.

A short opinion on web browsers

Life was simpler - if a lot more frustrating - when everyone just tolerated Internet Explorer 6, wasn't it? Now there are so many web browsers. But they aren't actually that different under the hood.

Many people get a new computer and continue to use the included web browser. Others simply install Google Chrome.

If you do this, you will regret it more than anything in your life. All your worst decisions will be but a paltry drop in the bucket of regret.

Chrome still has significant memory usage problems, and would you really want your window into the world wide web controlled by the one of the world's largest advertising agencies?

Nothing is actually "free". The legions of software developers working for Silicon Valley wages need paid somehow, so where do you think that money comes from?

Firefox remains the best of the worst, but this situation hasn't improved significantly over the years. It's also indirectly funded by said advertising agency, as has been often reported.

The other browsers - Brave and Opera, just run atop Chrome, so why bother?

The best Chromeclone is Vivaldi, which is made by the people who used to make Opera but gave up on its own rendering engine and sold the browser name to a dodgy Chinese consortium for some reason.

Therefore we must hope for something better to come along.

Until then your best bet is to get Firefox.

 

C.S. Lewis on Right and Wrong

I came across this quote from the respected author not too long ago. I like it and have decided to share it here:

"It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong, but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table." - C. S. Lewis

Ciaran Quinn Management Suite, v19

This is the Ciaran Quinn Management suite. Everything you could want to know about Ciaran can be found therein, alongside convenient adjustment features and a menu containing what we suspect are his views on a number of individuals. Included are a number of bundled utilities to make Ciaran's life easier.

It should work with Windows XP and above and the CQMS requires the .NET framework & Adobe Flash Player. If you don't know what that means, you probably have them both anyway.

 

Secure login information (necessary):

Username: jramsey69

Password: ismellpee123

 

DOWNLOAD v19 link removed for now

A helpful screenshot

 

Toaster Enthusiasm

So today for my ICT lab, as part of my Introduction to Computer Science course, I was contracted to produce a web page from simple HTML. Being me, this is a skill I have had since I was eleven and so the following events could be best described as wee buns and a slice of nice buttered toast. We were expected to produce two pages on a subject of our choice - with oddly specific requirements: 6 links related to the topic, 3 sentences on the first page and 2 paragraphs on the second. For some reason the phrase 'Toaster Enthusiasm' entered my mind and I decided to create a simple two page website based around enthusiasm for my favourite kitchen appliance.

Spring it up!

I immediately got to work, creating the simple web pages using all the HTML I could remember, laughingly styling it like something straight from 1997. I spent at least half an hour reading up and writing the paragraphs on the history of the electric toaster and even gave my own opinion on toaster etiquette. After checking the spelling and ensuring the pages were worthy of merit, I raised my hand and asked the demonstrator to check over my past hour's work. Much to my discontentment, they asked me to flick through it in less than 5 seconds just to check the hyperlinks were working. My heart sunk. All that effort. All that enthusiasm. Gone. They didn't even take the time to read over the nicely researched and carefully crafted articles, or even react to the amusing GIF. Disappointed.

Anyhow, the website exists here, should you share my enthusiasm for toasters.

Astral Tower Defence

So, I was going though the old Lazy Sofa Games site in my archive and came across this tower defence game from a while back....

 

 

Astral Tower Defence. It's still just as fun as I remember it, which is a rarity. Play it, you might actually have fun! I'm on wave 67 as we speak.

Also, just looking at that old Lazy Sofa Games website. Dancing Sarah Palin? Dear goodness.

Note from the future: Install the ruffle plugin to get Flash in your modern browser, this game still works with it in 2025!

No more bites from the Apple!

Yes, from today onwards I have decided to leave iTunes behind me. And the iTunes store, along with its music and Apps. And my iPhone, which is now on eBay. Even my MacBook is long behind me too.

But why, why such madness I hear you cry in that brain of yours? You may be thumping your keyboard like the Angry German Kid right now, screaming my name into your monitor, wondering why on earth one such as me would commit such a felony. Surely MacBooks are immaculate computers, a gift to us from above which upon adding one to your life, every computer-related problem suddently disappears and your life expectancy goes up by at least twenty more years.

Well, if I were to sum the next paragraph and several hundred words of my post up in one word; control.

Yes, control. Apple have too much of it and are taking it too far. Just take a look at the newest Mac Mini:

Ahh, pretty*

Notice anything unusual? THERE IS NO OPTICAL DRIVE!!

I mean nothing. Want to install something on it from one of those, you know, DVDs with software on it you bought just last year? Tough luck. Want to burn a CD from that huge collection you have been carefully building up for the past 30 years of your life? Tough luck. Would you like to watch a DVD? 'No', says Mr. Mac.

If you want to do any of these, ordinary everyday activities that every man and his dog, mouse and vole have been doing since people actually discovered computers could be useful for more than weekly accounts and typing letters to your nan, your only Apple-supported choice is to shell out £66 for one of these.

Or of course, re-purchase everything on the conveniently-placed iTunes store and Mac App Store that comes pre-installed on every Mac these days. For bargain prices such as £7.99 for albums which originally cost £4.99 on CD and go for like 99p on the used album market, plus you get one of those real existing physical CDs. And of course only software which Apple likes may go on the Mac App Store, no rooms for 'duplicates' or alternate options or free software, no sir.

I mean, I understand the need for pushing forward, and innovation and all that jazz, but cutting people off from things that are perfectly reusable, exist physically and may not even be available digitally does seem a bit backward to me. Also nice to know your big brother Apple is carefully watching everything you put on your computer and reserves the right to remove it at any time from their perfect walled garden of an online store. Hmm, I am beginning to like Microsoft again.

 

*I lied.

12/8/2012 Update: After ages of wrestling with my Android phone, I have finally decided to go back to Apple with an iPhone 4. It's great, because it works, unlike the Android one. I felt the need to rant as I value my optical media, but their iPhone is seriously the best smartphone out there. So this post is now quite pointless but still here for old time's sake.